It has been weeks since I washed the car. I like to wash the
car on the street in front of the house, but lately it has just been too damned
cold. When it hasn’t been cold, it has been slushy which makes washing the car
an exercise in futility. It is so dirty, it looks like a ghost car, all grey
and dirty grey. Okay, it is a grey car, but this is road dirt grey, which
incidentally isn’t on Acura’s colour palette for new cars.
I am going to have to bite the bullet and take it to one of
those coin car washes. There is a new car wash at the Co-op and for only $10 or
$12 you can drive the car through and have it emerge from the other side as
clean as a new penny. That is just not my way. I can wash the car at one of
those coin wash places for a buck if I am quick or two dollars at the most. It
is only going to get dirty again, so a quick wash is just what the doctor
ordered. Maybe on Sunday, because it is supposed to warm up to -2° and the car won’t
freeze into a solid block of ice if I give it a wipe and park it in the garage.
I thought about washing the car while I was in the shower
this morning. Well, I started thinking about showers and eventually got around
to dirty cars. It occurred to me that there are two types of people that shower,
and they shower at different times of day. There are the “workers” who shower
when they get home from work to clean the accumulated work dirt from their
bodies. They have worked up a sweat during the day and the dirt has stuck to
the sweat and turned into body mud. It fills all of the cracks and crevasse on
your body. Nothing feels better than scrubbing that muck off at the end of the
day.
The other kind of showerers, are the “wake-me-up” in the
morning people. They aren’t really dirty, more slightly dusty and a little bit
smelly, but they just can’t face the day without a shower. They think they are
dirty, but it is more imagined dirt than real. I was always the first kind of
shower guy. I would generally get sweaty at work and it was a cool relief to
wash the day away, especially in the summer. I rarely got muddy dirty, but I
was much dirtier than if I were sitting at a desk in the air conditioning.
Since retiring I have become one of those wake me up kind of shower people. I
suppose it’s good to start the day clean and fresh, but really how dirty can I
get drinking coffee and contemplating life?
When I was a kid, I just loved showers. I didn’t have many
for some reason. I think my parents hadn’t shaken the thought that heating
water was expensive and time consuming idea they got from their parents, so I
didn’t get as clean as I should have perhaps. I would stand under the showering
water and think I was in a rain forest or on a planet where it rained
constantly. Sometimes it was hard to breathe and you would just have to hold
your head at just the right angle to look up. You know, it was a strange planet
where it would rain all of the time. What happened to all the water, and how
was it that I could stand on solid ground? I never did figure that out, and now
it appears that I never will, I just don’t care anymore.
I did like baths because I could make soap bubble beards and
strange hairdos out of the suds. Not to mention being able to float toys and
splash water. The trouble with baths now is that there is just too much body
and too little empty water to really play effectively. Maybe that’s why some
adults like the hot tubs so much.
I read once how the ancients would use fragrant oil to clean
themselves. They would rub oil all over themselves and then scrape the oil and presumably
the dirt off with it. I guess that would work if you had someone around to
scrape you, but if you had to do it yourself it would pose something of a
challenge. There are places on my body that get dirty and are difficult to
reach with a cloth, let alone something stiff enough to scrape oil and dirt
off. Besides, wouldn’t you feel oily all of the time?
Maybe I will go to that strange planet tomorrow morning and
see if I still know how to breathe.
